Option A vs B: Decision Time

Tomorrow Edinburgh City Council will decide between Options A and B for the East-West Cycle route, after deferring a decision last September.  Some of the recent coverage:

• A visualisation of Roseburn Option A (above).
• A comparison of road layout, current against Option A (below).
• A letter in the Edinburgh Evening News from East-West nemesis Pete Gregson.
• A letter from Transport Committee head Leslie Hinds, rebutting the previous letter.
• A two-page spread in the Edinburgh Evening News.
• A blog post from Daisy Narayanan of Sustrans.

Daisy's post hit the mark:

We have seen narratives that create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ – pitting ‘motorists’ against ‘cyclists’ against ‘pedestrians’. With such projects, it is hugely disheartening to see what should have been a force for positive change become a focus for anger. It is equally disheartening to see strong evidence and the policies of the Scottish Government which support a more active, greener Scotland being undermined by such opposition.

In darker moments, I have been tempted to draw parallels to the post-fact world that we seem to inhabit at present.

Previously:
  Option A vs B: Kicked into the long grass

  Option A: Think about the children

  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

Do you have Q?

A study conducted at Northeastern analyses the factors that contribute to success in science. Age is not one of them.

The research team began by focusing on career physicists. It ransacked the literature going back to 1893, identifying 2,856 physicists with careers of 20 years or more who published at least one paper every five years — widely cited findings rated as “impact” papers — and the team analyzed when in a career those emerged. ...
[K]eeping productivity equal, the scientists were as likely to score a hit at age 50 as at age 25. The distribution was random; choosing the right project to pursue at the right time was a matter of luck.
Yet turning that fortuitous choice into an influential, widely recognized contribution depended on another element, one the researchers called Q.
Q could be translated loosely as “skill,” and most likely includes a broad variety of factors, such as I.Q., drive, motivation, openness to new ideas and an ability to work well with others. Or, simply, an ability to make the most of the work at hand: to find some relevance in a humdrum experiment, and to make an elegant idea glow.
“This Q factor is so interesting because it potentially includes abilities people have but may not recognize as central,” said Zach Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “Clear writing, for instance. Take the field of mathematical psychology. You may publish an interesting finding, but if the paper is unreadable, as so many are, you can’t have wide impact because no one understands what you’re talking about.”

Benedict Carey, New York Times, When It Comes to Success, Age is Just a Number.

Anti-semitism, conjured and real

Accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party have gone virtually unchallenged, which is unconscionable because almost all of what is referred to as 'anti-semitism' is simply legitimate protest against Israel's oppression of Palestinians. David Plank at Jews Sans Frontiers has just published a thorough debunking. 

I've been lucky to rarely face anti-semitism in my personal life. So its salutary to be reminded the extent to which it actually exists in the world. If nothing else, this is something that Donald Trump does well.

Trump's campaign is based on dog-whistle racism, including anti-semitism, as called out in An Open Letter to Jared Kushner from one of your Employees and, more humorously, by Jon Stewart in The Day I Woke Up To Find Out Somebody Was Tweeting Weird Shit About Me.

 

Of course, many others than Jews have faced the same racism, as noted in The Price I’ve Paid for Opposing Donald Trump.

The issues at stake have been eloquently stated, more forthrightly than in most media, by Adam Gopnik in A Point of View. I expect most folk reading this will not be supporters of Trump, but, if you are, please listen to it before you vote.

Papers We Love Remote Meetup: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Languages

I will reprise my June presentation to Papers We Love London at Papers We Love Remote Meetup 2, today at 7pm UK time, with the subject John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Languages. Learn the origins of denotational semantics and continuations. Additional citations here. See you there!

Lambdaman (and Lambdawoman) supporting Bootstrap - Last Three Days!

You have just three more days to order your own Lambdaman or Lambdawoman t-shirt, as featured in the video of Propositions as Types. Now available in unisex, children's, and women's shirts. Profits go to Bootstrap, an organisation run by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, and the PLT group that teaches functional programming to middle and high school students. Order will be printed on October 15. 

Lambdaman, supporting Bootstrap

After watching talks or videos of Propositions as Types, folk ask me how they can get their own Lambdaman t-shirt. In the past, I tried to make it available through various services, but they always rejected the design as a copyright violation. (It's not, it's fair use.) Thanks to a little help from my friends, CustomInk has agreed to print the design as a Booster. Sign up now, order will be printed on October 15. Any profits (there will be more if there is a bigger order) go to Bootstrap, an organisation run by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, and the PLT group that teaches functional programming to middle and high school students. Order has already surpassed our goal of fifty shirts!

Option A vs B: Kicked into the long grass

I've been putting off posting about the final outcome of the West-East Cycle Route confrontation at Edinburgh City Council's Transport and Environment committee, in part because there was no final outcome.

I sat through four hours of Edinburgh Council's Transport and Environment Committee. The end result was a fudge. The Council heard adamant depositions from both sides, and decided not to decide. They will form a stakeholder group, with representatives from all involved, and attempt to come to a compromise that satisfies all sides. But it's hard to see how that can happen: if we don't get a straight route it will be a disaster, but if we do folk in Roseburn will fear an impact on their businesses (studies show cycle routes don't harm business, but they seem to be taking the Gove line: they are tired of hearing from experts).

Though perhaps we were lucky to get a fudge. Had it gone to a straight vote, following the whip Greens and Labour would have voted for Option A (7 votes) while the SDP, Conservatives, and Liberal Democrats would have voted for Option B (8 votes). As it was, the Greens gave a rousing defense of Option A, with fantastic speeches from Nigel Bagshaw and Chas Booth. Everyone else supported the 'compromise', and took the opportunity to excoriate the Greens for taking a principled stand. Even those who would have voted for Option B expressed support for cycling, and perhaps that is something we can build on.

Dave duFeu of Spokes posted an excellent summary, including links to the webcast of the meeting and a list of the steps you can take to support the West-East Cycle Route.

The Edinburgh Evening News offered coverage in the two days before: Cyclists take to street to support £6m cycle “superhighway” and D-Day for cycleway in Edinburgh amidst anger and division. The first of these features a couple of photos of me arguing with opponents of the cycle route in Roseburn. I don't look calm and collected. Oddly, I can't find any coverage the Evening News gave to the outcome of the Transport and Environment committee meeting. Was there any?

Not only are Roseburn residents up in arms. A similar cycleway in Bearsden, near Glasgow, is attracting comparable ire from its locals. What is our best way forward to fight bicycle bigots?

Previously: 

  Option A: Think about the children

  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

What is it like to understand advanced mathematics?

A correspondent on Quora explains the insider's view to an outsider. Some selections:

• You can answer many seemingly difficult questions quickly. But you are not very impressed by what can look like magic, because you know the trick. The trick is that your brain can quickly decide if a question is answerable by one of a few powerful general purpose "machines"  (e.g., continuity arguments, the correspondences between geometric and algebraic objects, linear algebra, ways to reduce the infinite to the finite through various forms of compactness) combined with specific facts you have learned about your area. The number of fundamental ideas and techniques that people use to solve problems is, perhaps surprisingly, pretty small -- seehttp://www.tricki.org/tricki/map for a partial list, maintained by Timothy Gowers.
• You go up in abstraction, "higher and higher". The main object of study yesterday becomes just an example or a tiny part of what you are considering today. For example, in calculus classes you think about functions or curves. In functional analysis or algebraic geometry, you think of spaces whose pointsare functions or curves -- that is, you "zoom out" so that every function is just a point in a space, surrounded by many other "nearby" functions. Using this kind of zooming out technique, you can say very complex things in short sentences -- things that, if unpacked and said at the zoomed-in level, would take up pages. Abstracting and compressing in this way makes it possible to consider extremely complicated issues with one's limited memory and processing power.
• You are easily annoyed by imprecision in talking about the quantitative or logical. This is mostly because you are trained to quickly think about counterexamples that make an imprecise claim seem obviously false.

ISDS enables corruption

I've long known that ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) is one of the worst aspects of TTIP, TTP, and CETA. But I've thought the main problem with ISDS was first, that it enabled businessmen to sue governments over laws enacted to save their citizenry (as in the cartoon below), and, second, its secrecy. What I did not understand was how it enables corruption. Kudos to Buzzfeed for their detailed investigation.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals. This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.

The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring revelation: Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum. Based on exclusive reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and Asia, BuzzFeed News has found the following:

• A Dubai real estate mogul and former business partner of Donald Trump was sentenced to prison for collaborating on a deal that would swindle the Egyptian people out of millions of dollars — but then he turned to ISDS and got his prison sentence wiped away.
• In El Salvador, a court found that a factory had poisoned a village — including dozens of children — with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the toxic metal from seeping out. But the factory owners’ lawyers used ISDS to help the company dodge a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the area and providing needed medical care.
• Two financiers convicted of embezzling more than $300 million from an Indonesian bank used an ISDS finding to fend off Interpol, shield their assets, and effectively nullify their punishment.

Option A: Think about the children

Fellow tweeter @DarlingSteveEDI captured my image (above) as we gathered for Ride the Route this morning, in support of Option A for the Edinburgh's proposed West-East Cycle Route (the route formerly known as Roseburn to Leith Walk). My own snap of the gathering is below.

Fellow blogger Eilidh Troup considers another aspect of the route, safety for schoolchildren. Option A is far safer than Option B for young children cycling to school: the only road crossing in Option A is guarded by a lollipop lady, while children taking Option B must cross *three* busy intersections unaided.

It's down to the wire: members of the Transport and Environment Committee vote tomorrow. The final decision may be closely balanced, so even sending your councillor (and councillors on the committee) a line or two can have a huge impact. If you haven't written, write now, right now!

Previously:
  Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!
  Ride the Route in support of Option A

Late breaking addendum:
  Sustrans supports Option A: It’s time for some big decisions…
 

Ride the Route in support of Option A

I've written before about the Edinburgh West-East Cycle Route (previously called Roseburn to Leith Walk), and the importance of choosing Option A over Option B.

It's fantastic that Edinburgh has decided to invest 10% of its transport budget into active travel. If we invest regularly and wisely in cycling infrastructure, within twenty years Edinburgh could be a much more pleasant place to live and work, on a par with Copenhagen or Rotterdam. But that requires investing the effectively. The choice of Option A vs B is a crucial step along the way. Option B offers a far less direct route and will do far less to attract new people to cycling, undermining the investment and making it harder to attract additional funding from Sustrans. Unless we start well, it will be harder to continue well.

SNP Councillors are putting it about that since Sustrans awarded its competition to Glasgow rather than Edinburgh that the route cannot be funded. But that is nonsense. Edinburgh can build the route on its own, it would just take longer. And in any event, year on year funding from Sustrans is still available. But funding is only likely to be awarded for an ambitious project that will attract more folk to cycling, and that means Option A.

(Imagine if auto routes were awarded by competition. You can have the M80 to Glasgow or the M90 to Edinburgh, but not both ... Sort of like the idea of holding a bake sale to fund a war ...)

Supporters have organised a Ride the Route event 8am Monday 29 August, leaving from Charlotte Square, which will take councillors and press along the route to promote Option A.  (And here's a second announcement from Pedal on Parliament.) I hope to see you there!

Eric Joyce: Why the Brexit vote pushed me to support Scottish independence

Former Labour MP Eric Joyce explains his change of heart.

At the referendum, still an MP, I gave independence very serious thought right up to the close of the vote. I finally came down on the side of No because I thought big EU states with a potential secession issue, like Spain and France, would prevent an independent Scotland joining the EU. This is obviously no longer the case. And I was, like the great majority of the economists and other experts whose opinion I valued, convinced that being outside the EU would be bonkers – it would badly harm our economy and hurt Scots in all sorts of unforeseen ways too.
The Brexit vote reversed that overnight: all of the arguments we in the unionist camp had used were made invalid at worst, questionable at best. This doesn’t mean they were necessarily all wrong. But it does mean that open-minded, rational No voters should at the very least seriously re-consider things in the light of the staggering new context. They should have an open ear to the experts saying that with independence, jobs in Scotland’s financial and legal service sectors will expand as English and international firms look to keep a foothold in the EU.  And to the reasonable prospect of an eventual £50+ oil price might realistically open the way to a final, generational, upswing in employment, and to security for Scotland’s extractive industries and their supply chain. And to the idea that preserving Scotland’s social democracy in the face of the Little Englander mentality of right-wing English Tories might be worth the fight.

Propositions as Types generalised: The Rosetta Stone

From Physics,Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone by John C. Baez and Mike Stay, courtesy of @CompSciFact, @sigfpe, and @notjfmc.

Roseburn to Leith Walk A vs B: time to act!

On 2 August, I attended a meeting in Roseburn organised by those opposed to the new cycleway planned by the city. Local shopkeepers fear they will see a reduction in business, unaware this is a common cycling fallacy: study after study has shown that adding cycleways increases business, not the reverse, because pedestrians and cyclists find the area more attractive.

Feelings in Roseburn run strong. The locals don't trust the council: who can blame them after the fiasco over trams? But the leaders of the campaign are adept at cherry picking statistics, and, sadly, neither side was listening to the other.

On 30 August, the Edinburgh Council Transport and Environment Committee will decide between two options for the cycle route, A and B. Route A is direct. Route B goes round the houses, adding substantial time and rendering the whole route less attractive. If B is built, the opportunity to shift the area away from cars, to make it a more pleasant place to be and draw more business from those travelling by foot, bus, and cycle, goes out the window.

Locals like neither A nor B, but in a spirit of compromise the Transport and Environment Committee may opt for B. This will be a disaster, as route B will be far less likely to draw people out of their cars and onto their cycles, undermining Edinburgh's ambitious programme to attract more people to cycling before it even gets off the ground.

Investing in cycling infrastructure can make an enormous difference. Scotland suffers 2000 deaths per year due to pollution, and 2500 deaths per year due to inactivity. The original proposal for the cycleway estimates benefits of £14.5M over ten years (largely from improved health of those attracted to cycling) vs a cost of £5.7M, a staggering 3.3x return on investment. Katie Cycles to School is a brilliant video from Pedal on Parliament that drives home how investment in cycling will improve lives for cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Want more detail? Much has been written on the issues.
  Roseburn Cycle Route: Evidence-based local community support.
  Conviction Needed.

The Transport Committee will need determination to carry the plan through to a successful conclusion. This is make or break: will Edinburgh be a city for cars or a city for people? Please write to your councillors and the transport and environment committee to let them know your views.

Previously: 
Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway: A vs B
Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway: the website

Roseburn to Leith Walk

Subsequently:
Ride the Route in support of Option A
Option A: Think about the children

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

Many programming languages, especially domain-specific ones, are designed by amateurs. How do we prevent obvious irregularities and disasters in languages before they become widespread? (Aspects of Javascript and R come to mind.)

Folk in the human-computer interaction community have a notion of 'expert evaluation'. I wonder if we could develop something similar for programming languages?

Jakub Zalewski passed me the article 'What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists', which treads related ground, but for physics rather than computing.

Michael Moore: Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win

In the Huffington Post, Michael Moore give the most incisive (and hilarious) analysis I've seen. We have to understand why this is happening if we are to have a hope of preventing it.

1. Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes - Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states - but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. ...

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.

4. The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton - we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ‘08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” - meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket - that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.

Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway: the website

There is a new website in support of the Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway. I especially like their promise to be evidence-based and to cover both sides, something increasingly rare in political discourse.

We are an informal association of local residents working to get the best for our community from the Proposed Cycle Route.  We've spent hundreds of hours gathering the facts.

1. Even if you don't cycle, the Cycle Route has big benefits for you
2. Common concerns don't match the facts
3. The Council's latest revised design has addressed key concerns.

Our promise

Our site is evidence-based, including the disadvantages.  We are ready to engage in discussion with anyone.  Tell us about errors or omissions and we'll fix them as soon as we can.

Our goals

• Get the best for all residents. This is not a website advocating cycling.  It's true that many of the founders do cycle, and many of us also drive.
• Make decisions based on the facts.  We are concerned how many people are voicing fears and criticisms yet don't seem to know about some of the most important data and studies.
• Listen to all views, and bring people together for discussion.  We don't accept the whole notion of classifying people as 'cyclists' and 'drivers'.  We are all ordinary people who use a variety of means of travel appropriate to different situations.

Where we find ourselves

Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian sums up the state of affairs.

It’s gripping, of course. Game of Thrones meets House of Cards, played out at the tempo of a binge-viewed box-set. ...
This week’s antics of Gove and Johnson are a useful reminder. For the way one has treated the other is the way both have treated the country. ...
[Johnson] didn’t believe a word of his own rhetoric, we know that now. His face last Friday morning, ashen with the terror of victory, proved it. That hot mess of a column he served up on Monday confirmed it again: he was trying to back out of the very decision he’d persuaded the country to make.  ...
When doctrine is kept distilled, pure and fervently uncontaminated by reality, it turns into zealotry
So we have the appalling sight of Gove on Friday, proclaiming himself a proud believer in the UK even though it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that a leave vote would propel Scotland towards saying yes in a second independence referendum. The more honest leavers admit – as Melanie Phillips did when the two of us appeared on Newsnight this week – that they believe the break-up of the union is a price worth paying for the prize of sovereignty. ...
They did it with lies, whether the false promise that we could both halt immigration and enjoy full access to the single market or that deceitful £350m figure, still defended by Gove, which tricked millions into believing a leave vote would bring a cash windfall to the NHS. They did it with no plan, as clueless about post-Brexit Britain as Bush and Blair were about post-invasion Iraq.
Senior civil servants say Brexit will consume their energies for years to come, as they seek to disentangle 40 years of agreements. It will be the central focus of our politics and our government, a massive collective effort demanding ingenuity and creativity. Just think of what could have been achieved if all those resources had been directed elsewhere. Into addressing, for instance, the desperate, decades-long needs – for jobs, for housing, for a future – of those towns that have been left behind by the last 30 years of change, those towns whose people voted leave the way a passenger on a doomed train pulls the emergency cord.

Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycleway: A vs B

Edinburgh City Council has released its report on consultation on the Roseburn to Leith Walk cycleway, and Henry Whaley has written a comment for the Edinburgh Evening News.

A few shopkeepers in the area are concerned that the cycleway will have a negative impact on their shops, a well-known cycling fallacy. Whaley describes the current impasse:

The Council have responded to specific concerns from some shopkeepers and residents by reinstating the loading bay on the north side of Roseburn Terrace, increasing the right turn lane and eliminating the floating bus stop whilst maintaining the cyclepath to form a much improved ‘Option A’.
The Council are also assessing an alternative ‘Option B’, which would take the cyclepath away from Roseburn Terrace, on an indirect and complicated route involving three road crossings as well as restricting the space for motor vehicles at the already tight Roseburn Street Junction and not widening the Roseburn Terrace pavements. It’s another option, but one that is worse for most people.

And from the City Council:

Transport Convener Councillor Lesley Hinds said: "We had an overwhelming response to the consultation and the exercise has been extremely helpful to officers working on the proposed Roseburn to Leith Walk cycleway and street improvements.
"Thanks to the feedback received, we've been able to make deliverable adjustments to a number of aspects of the scheme. In terms of the Roseburn section, local concerns have prompted us to present an alternative route (Option B) via Roseburn Place and Roseburn Street for consideration by committee members. However, we remain in favour of Option A because it will enhance the street environment in Roseburn Terrace and is more direct for cyclists - involving one road crossing rather than the three that would be required for Option B.
"After further planned consultation with businesses, community councils and the Council's Active Travel Forum, the project team will consolidate feedback and finalise the preliminary design scheme for presentation to the Transport and Environment Committee on 30 August 2016."

Brexit implies Techxit?

In the wake of the EU referendum, there appears to be considerable information about its consequences that many might wish to have seen before the vote. Some of this concerns the negative impact of Brexit on technology firms. Among others, the BBC has a summary.

I was particularly struck by one comment in the story, made by start-up mentor Theo Priestley (pictured above),.

And Mr Priestley thinks that in the event of a Scottish independence referendum that leads to reunification with the EU, it's possible some start-ups could move north of the border, perhaps to rekindle "Silicon Glen" - a 1980s attempt to compete in the semiconductor industry.

A sad day

I don't know what to say. I feel let down, and I feel the UK has let the world down, as well as itself.

Brexit is a fake revolt – working-class culture is being hijacked to help the elite

What dismays me most about the EU debate is that what people say it is about and what it is really about are quite different. Paul Mason in the Guardian analyses the problem clearly.

To people getting ready for the mother of all revolts on Thursday, I want to point out the crucial difference between a real revolt and a fake one. The elite does not usually lead the real ones. In a real revolt, the rich and powerful usually head for the hills, terrified. Nor are the Sun and the Daily Mail usually to be found egging on a real insurrection. ...

I want to have one last go at convincing you that leaving now, under these conditions, would be a disaster. First, let’s recognise the problem. For people in the working classes, wages are at rock bottom. Their employers treat them like dirt. Their high streets are lined with empty shops. Their grownup kids cannot afford to buy a home. Class sizes at school are too high. NHS waiting times are too long. ...

But a Brexit led by Ukip and the Tory right will not make any of these things better: it will make them worse. Take a look at the people leading the Brexit movement. Nigel Farage, Neil Hamilton, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove. They have fought all their lives for one objective: to give more power to employers and less to workers. Many leading Brexiters are on record as wanting to privatise the NHS. They revelled in the destruction of the working-class communities and cultures capable of staging real revolt. Sir James Dyson moved his factory to Malaysia, so much did he love the British workforce. They talk about defying the “elite”. But they are the elite.

Joy of Coding

Despite a gamy leg, I had a fantastic time in Rotterdam at Joy of Coding. They do a fantastic job taking care of their speakers and their attendees. Highlight was learning from a fellow guest about Ethereum ('We used to have one computer per institution, then one per person, and now one per planet'), and then coming home to a post about it tweeted by Crista Lopes.

Brexit: The cost to Tech and the cost to Universities

Two articles by computer security researcher Ross Anderson.

• Brexit and technology: How network effects will damage UK IT industry
• Brexit will cost Cambridge University £100M a year

A UK that makes up 1% of world population and 3% of world GDP has little influence on IT markets; a post-Brexit Britain would have even less. Most software markets have been global for decades.
The EU has real clout though. From the viewpoint of Silicon Valley, Brussels is the world’s privacy regulator, since Washington doesn’t care and nobody else is big enough to matter.
Brussels also calls the shots on competition policy. The reason you get offered a randomised choice of default browser when switching on a new Windows PC in Europe is that the EU competition authorities insisted on it. This was punishment for Microsoft using its desktop monopoly to trash Netscape – which was an offence in the US too, but the Bush administration couldn’t be bothered to prosecute it.
If you want someone to police the side-effects of network effects and globalisation, the European Commission is just about the only sheriff in town.

But in the long term the biggest problem may not just be money.
Great universities thrive by drawing the best and the brightest from round the world, to be our students, to be our research staff, and to be our academics. Most of our new hires are foreign.
We already have a hard time competing with America for the best people. What will happen if Britain votes to leave Europe following a campaign of xenophobia – which has spilled over into outright racism?
This is not just about money; it's about who we are, and also about what other people perceive us to be.
Even if Remain wins on Thursday, we've all been damaged. If it goes the other way, the world may conclude that Britain is no longer the best place to send your kids, or to build one of your research labs.

“Dishonesty on an industrial scale”: EU law expert analyses referendum debate

Authoritative sources in the EU debate are thin on the ground, so I was pleased when a colleague pointed me to a video by University of Liverpool Law School’s Professor Michael Dougan, a leading expert in EU law. It runs 25 minutes and is well worth the time. I've transcribed a couple of segments below.

I've just watched with increasing dismay as this referendum debate has unfolded, and though I have to say the Remain side has not covered themselves in glory at points with their use of dodgy statistics, I think the Leave campaign has degenerated into dishonesty, really, on an industrial scale --- there's really no other way to put it ...  For someone who works in the field like I do, it's probably the equivalent of an evolutionary biologist listening to a bunch of creationists tell the public that creation theory is right and evolution is completely wrong. It really is that bad ... and yet it's working.

The second idea I think which has become pervasive is that somehow this is a debate about us and them. The EU is somebody else, and we are somehow the pathetic victims of Brussels as if this country was incapable of looking after itself.  To an EU lawyer, indeed to anyone who works in the field, this is just absolutely bizarre.  ... In the field we refer to The Big Three, the UK, France, and Germany, because between them the UK, France, and Germany provide the EU with its political, its economic, its diplomatic leadership. And indeed, virtually nothing happens in the EU without the big three being in control of it. The UK, to put it simply, has enormous influence within the EU.  It sets agendas, it negotiates alliances, it builds and brokers compromises.  ... Remember, the EU is not run by the unelected eurocrats of the commission as we hear all the time, it's actually run by the 28 governments of the council working together with the European Parliament.  Despite the fact that majority voting is the normal rule within the council, in practice about 90% of EU decisions are still taken by consensus.  In other words, the member states negotiate until everyone feels basically happy with the decision. And it couldn't be otherwise.  The EU is the creation of its member states, it has to serve their basic national interests, and it does so through a process of compromise and negotiation. So the EU isn't someone else, it's not something that happens to us, we are major players, leading players, within the European Union.

Here's to an informed debate!

CAPS: Cycling Action Plan for Scotland

In 2010, the Scottish Government set out a 'vision' that 10% of all trips should be made by cycle and foot by 2020. In the recent Scottish parliamentary elections, the SNP maintained it is 'determined' to achieve this vision, but funding remains low, at 2% of the transport budget. But the government established CAPS, the Cycling Action Plan for Scotland, and its most recent report includes a heartening call to action.

CAPS 2016 Pre-requisites for Success: A successful modal shift to cycling requires the following six pre-requisites for success being met:

• A shared national vision for a 10% modal share of everyday journeys should remain, with a related clear aspiration for reduction in car use, especially for short journeys, by both national and local government.

• A long term increase in sustained funding is required, with year-on-year increases over time towards a 10% allocation of national and council transport budgets as Edinburgh is achieving. The long term commitment to 2030 to dual carriageways between seven Scottish cities should be matched by an equally long term commitment to cycling if modal shift ambitions are to be met and sustained.

• The national 10% modal share vision should be supported by local cycling strategies and delivery plans at council and regional levels. Local modal share objectives should be coordinated with the national vision to create a feasible route to 10%.

• Cities will be the driver of significant modal shift and the national vision should be directly coordinated with a specific focus on reaching at least 10% modal share in the cities and the largest urban areas, implementing best practice.

• The primary investment focus should be on enabling cycling through changing the physical environment for short journeys to enable anyone to cycle.

• Government at all levels needs to build and maintain staff capacity to manage cycle infrastructure and the local road network in the present financial climate. 

Build and maintain dedicated cycling infrastructure, enabling people aged 8-80 to cycle on coherent cycle networks in cities and towns. This entails cohesive, comprehensive and seamless networks of on-road segregated paths in cities and, where appropriate, alongside trunk roads and busier local roads in rural areas. In the urban setting such networks will link into and incorporate existing off-road networks where they deliver direct and high quality routes. ‘Success’ should not only be measured in terms of additional kilometres of network but have a qualitative aspect, including following good practice design standards, numbers of segregated cycle lanes, and integration with public transport. Perceptions of safety and protection of non-motorised users - both of which must be tackled - will be enhanced by the introduction of measures such as 20 mph speed limits in urban settings. 

Develop a long term communication plan that represents cycling as something that anyone can do, not simply a minority and is a transport mode that brings many benefits to Scotland: a healthier, less polluting nation, enjoying better public space, improved air quality and less congested streets. A continuous and consistent campaign would aim to win ‘the hearts and minds’ of the public about the benefits of cycling. Rather than about behaviour, or indeed about the environment, the main message for this campaign should be about improved quality of life for people. The economic benefits for rural and suburban areas should not be overlooked. Cycling for leisure, recreation and sport can be essential gateway activities to enable more people to try and enjoy everyday utility cycling and the economic benefits of leisure and tourism-related cycling, especially in remote areas, should not be overlooked. Programmes should reinforce different forms of cycling to maximise inclusiveness while never losing sight of the over-riding need for modal shift. 

Roseburn to Leith Walk

I want the UK to stay in the EU, and I want Scotland to be an independent country. But it is hard for one person to have an impact on such major issues. I've decided on a more modest focus: improving cycling in Edinburgh and Scotland, and specifically building more segregated cycle paths.

Thanks to the work of many, including Spokes and Walk Cycle Vote, there is already progress. In 2012 Edinburgh City Council has agreed to commit 5% of its transport budget to cycling, increasing by 1% a year until it reaches 10% next year. One of the first major outcomes is the proposed Roseburn to Leith Walk Cycle route.

The proposal includes a detailed economic case, which is worth a look from anyone interested in promotion of segregated cycling. It predicts that the estimated £6.3M cost will lead to an 88% increase in folk cycling in the affected regions, leading to a £13.1M savings from improvements to health, £5.3M improvement to the GCP (Gross Cycling Product, e.g., increases in tourism and is sales of cycles), and £1.0M of benefits from reduced car usage (such as fewer accidents).

Benefits: Gross Cycling ProductResearch suggests that cycling benefits the local economy and a national study carried out by the London School of Economics (LSE) in 20108 concluded that each cyclist contributes a Gross Cycling Product (GCP) of £230 per year to the economy. This research was supported by a European wide study which found that cycling delivers wider economic benefits in terms of supporting jobs and driving tourism – with cycling having a greater employment intensity than any other transport sub-sector. Applying the findings of the LSE study to the forecast increase in cycling, the scheme will generate a GCP benefit of £5,753,218 over the 10 year scheme life.

Naomi Klein: The Best is Yet to Come

Amidst all the bad news, Naomi Klein shines a ray of light.

Taken together, the evidence is clear: The left just won. Forget the nomination—I mean the argument. Clinton, and the 40-year ideological campaign she represents, has lost the battle of ideas. The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of data.

What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud—free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy. And the crowds are cheering. With so much encouragement, who knows what’s next? Reparations for slavery and colonialism? A guaranteed annual income? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs program? Why not? The intellectual fencing that has constrained the left’s imagination for so long is lying twisted on the ground. ...

Looking beyond this election cycle, this is actually good news. If Sanders could come this far, imagine what a left candidate who was unburdened by his weaknesses could do. A political coalition that started from the premise that economic inequality and climate destabilization are inextricable from systems of racial and gender hierarchy could well build a significantly larger tent than the Sanders campaign managed to erect.

And if that movement has a bold plan for humanizing and democratizing new technology networks and global systems of trade, then it will feel less like a blast from the past, and more like a path to an exciting, never-before-attempted future. Whether coming after one term of Hillary Clinton in 2020, or one term of Donald Trump, that combination—deeply diverse and insistently forward-looking—could well prove unbeatable.

Scientists for EU

Scientists for EU wrote a cogent letter explaining how the EU advances UK science, and how UK science advantages the UK. You can sign it here.

Please read this letter, add your name and share this link with other scientists.
Scientific advance and innovation are critically dependent on collaboration. To remain a world-leading science nation, we must be team players.
The EU leads the world in science output, is beating the US in science growth – and is rapidly increasing investment in research. The EU is a science superpower. Our place in this team has boosted our science networking, access to talent, shared infrastructure and UK science policy impact. The economy of scale streamlines bureaucracy and brings huge added value for all. International collaborations have 40% more impact than domestic-only research.
Strong science is key for our economy and quality of life. It creates a virtuous cycle, leveraging investment from industry, raising productivity and creating high-value jobs for our future. In fact, 20% of UK jobs currently rely on some science knowledge. Science brings better medicines, cleaner energy, public health protections, a safer environment, new technologies and solutions to global challenges.
If we leave the EU, the UK will lose its driving seat in this world-leading team. Free-flow of talent and easy collaboration would likely be replaced by uncertainty, capital flight, market barriers and costly domestic red-tape. This would stifle our science, innovation and jobs.
It is no surprise that a recent survey showed 93% of research scientists and engineers saying the EU is a “major benefit” to UK research. The surprise is that many voters are still unaware that UK science and its benefits would be demoted by a vote to leave.
We, the undersigned, urge you to seriously consider the implications for UK science when you vote in the referendum on UK membership of the EU.

A week of cycling ideas from Copenhagen

People for Bikes is visiting Copenhagen to learn about its famous cycling infrastructure. A week of stories is archived here, including The Great Copenhagen Loading Zone Compromise and How bikes make Copenhagen's neighbourhood business districts thrive.

David Turner Festschrift

Your chance to submit to a Festschrift for David Turner.

A busy summer

I'll be speaking at the following events.

• Joy of Coding, 17 June 2016, De Doelen, Rotterdam; keynote speaker.
• ACSD, 22—24 June 2016, Torun; keynote speaker.
• BETTY Summer School, 27 June—1 July 2016, Limassol, Cyprus; lecturer.
• International Summer School on Metaprogramming, 8—12 August 2016, Cambridge; lecturer.
• Lambda World, 1 October 2016, Cadiz; keynote speaker.

Hope to see you at one of these!

Papers We Love: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages

I've added online links to the relevant papers (not behind paywalls), copied here.

Papers we love: John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages

7 June 2016, Skills Matter, London.
Certain papers change your life. McCarthy's 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I)' (1960) changed mine, and so did Landin's 'The Next 700 Programming Languages' (1966). And I remember the moment, halfway through my graduate career, when Guy Steele handed me Reynolds's 'Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages' (1972).
It is now common to explicate the structure of a programming language by presenting an interpreter for that language. If the language interpreted is the same as the language doing the interpreting, the interpreter is called meta-circular.
Interpreters may be written at differing levels of detail, to explicate different implementation strategies. For instance, the interpreter may be written in a continuation-passing style; or some of the higher-order functions may be represented explicitly using data-structures, via defunctionalisation.
More elaborate interpreters may be derived from simpler versions, thus providing a methodology for discovering an implementation strategy and showing it correct. Each of these techniques has become a mainstay of the study of programming languages, and all of them were introduced in this single paper by Reynolds.

Related material

• John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages, 1972.
• John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages, 1998.
• John Reynolds, Definitional Interpreters Revisited, 1998.
• John Reynolds, The Discoveries of Continuations, 1993.
• John McCarthy, Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, 1960.
• John McCarthy, Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation, 1962.
• Peter Landin, The Next 700 Programming Languages, 1966.
• Gordon Plotkin, Call-by-value, Call-by-name, and the Lambda Calculus, 1975.
• Robin Milner, A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming, 1978.
• Fermin Reig, ed, Reminiscences of Influential Papers, SIGPLAN Notices, 38(12):9—10, December 2003.